Hancheng pepper output ranks first in the country, helping 40,000 growers escape poverty and prosper
Right now it is pepper-picking season. At the Beidingyuan pepper industry demonstration base in Zhiyang Town, Hancheng City, vast pepper groves are scattered across the land, the plump peppercorns are vividly beautiful, and the pepper farmers, faces full of joy, are busy in the groves alongside workers. In Hancheng, pepper accounts for 60% of the city's total agricultural output value, with total revenue reaching 2 billion yuan, enabling more than 40,000 growers to escape poverty and prosper. Today, the city's pepper planting area reaches 550,000 mu, with an annual output of 24,000 tons, making it the county (city) with the largest scale, highest output and best returns in the country.
Pepper is a distinctive industry for our province in expanding the forestry industry and boosting forest farmers' incomes. In recent years, Shaanxi forestry has continuously increased policy support and funding, going all out to advance the construction of forest-fruit demonstration bases, bringing forth a number of national-level demonstration counties for famous, special and high-quality economic forests, and blazing a trail that organically combines ecology with industry and forest prosperity with people's prosperity. At present, the province's pepper planting area reaches more than 2.6 million mu, with an output of 64,000 tons, ranking first in the country.
A. The “golden strings” that boost farmers' incomes
Hancheng “Dahongpao” is renowned within and beyond the province for its “large grains and plump flesh, bright color, rich aroma and mellow numbing flavor.”
When the reporter met Ning Xiaowu, a villager from Zhaofeng Village in Zhiyang Town, he had just finished work in the pepper grove and stepped out of the field. Having grown pepper for more than 20 years, he now has a grove of over ten mu with seven or eight hundred pepper trees. Last year the pepper market was good, selling for 80 yuan per kilogram, and his more than 1,000 kilograms of pepper brought him a net income of more than 60,000 yuan.
“In the past we mainly farmed grain, and the fields were all planted with wheat, so life was hard. After planting pepper, life gradually improved, and now things are getting better and better. Today every household in the village grows pepper, and the most successful can harvest four or five thousand jin a year.” Ning Xiaowu said that through pepper cultivation his life has undergone earth-shaking changes, and the year before last he built a new house with five large rooms.
To promote the development of the pepper industry, Hancheng City, following the approach of “scaled bases, branded operations and socialized services,” set policies, held training, built markets, fostered enterprises and established brands, forming an operating pattern of “government guidance + association + leading enterprises” and “wholesale market + base + farmers.” The pepper industry has gradually stepped from scale expansion onto a track of market-oriented, branded, standardized and industrialized operation. At present, the city has formed 195 specialized pepper villages, and the per-capita pepper income of pepper farmers is 13,000 yuan.